by Jesse Ball
The Best Hiding Place of All
The best hiding place of all, said James's friend Ansilon, from his perch atop James's shoulder, is inside something hollow when no one knows it's hollow.
Ansilon was James's one friend. He was an invisible owl who could tell the future and also speak English, although he preferred to speak in the owl language, which James understood perfectly.
—But if no one knows that it's hollow, said James, then how would I manage to know that it's hollow? Should I just go around with a little hammer, tapping things?
For that reason, said Ansilon, I have purchased for you with what little money I have this lovely little gold hammer. He brought out from a pocket somewhere in his feathers a tiny gold hammer, and handed it with his beak to James.
James took the hammer in his hand. It had a nice weight to it.
Tap everything, said Ansilon, with that hammer, and you'll soon find hollow places in which you can hide, or in which you can hide your precious belongings. But be sure no one else is around when you use the hammer, or you will be found out. It has, after all, he said, happened before that someone who didn't want to was found out, and it happens especially much to boys your age.
James hated it when Ansilon talked about how young he was. Ansilon was 306 years old and knew everything there was to know. But while he was very helpful he was also a bit arrogant, and presumed too much.
—I'm not that young, said James. I'll be seven in three days.
And that's why, said Ansilon, I've gotten you this hammer. Don't you like it?
—Very much, said James. You're my best friend.
It's good, said Ansilon, for a person to only ever have one friend in his life. It makes things simpler. Shall we be each other's one friend?
—Yes, said James. I will be your one friend, and you will be mine.
Ansilon moved about on James's shoulder in a happy way, and his eyes opened and closed.
We shall spend a great deal of time awake at night, then, said Ansilon, for that is my favorite time.
—I don't mind, said James. For we shall have such adventures!
Everyone was looking at him. They were waiting for him to speak. Their patience seemed inexhaustible.
Behind James then, the maids' door opened. The maid who had opened it saw the scene, squealed, and shut the door. Within the room then, more squeals, and the sound of feet.
—I was just, said James, looking for the fourth window in my room. It's strange, you know, to have a window go missing. I believe it can be reached by ladder, perhaps from the space behind . . .
—Do you see what I mean? McHale said to Sermon.
—Precisely, said Sermon.
Leonora Loft shook her head.
—I think, said Sermon, we should have our little talk sooner rather than later, James. There's been a problem. The police have come again. They're outside.
—Outside? said James. But I didn't do anything. Why are they looking for me?
—Didn't do anything? said McHale. You told me yourself you pushed Mayne out the window.
—I never said that.
James looked helplessly back and forth. What was going on? Why were they all down here in the first place?
—Well, I suppose you didn't, but it was obvious. After all, why would you be in his room, in his home?
—We should go downstairs, said McHale. The police are waiting.
James looked from face to face. Leonora looked intrigued by the whole thing. McHale was impassive. Sermon was grave. And Grieve's father, a large man with a mole, whose presence seemed to fill the hallway, Grieve's father was smiling.
—I know you're the ones, said James. I know you killed McHale, and I know that you, he said, pointing his finger at Grieve's father. I know you're SAMEDI.
Grieve's father laughed.
—My daughter, he said, thinks very highly of you. I understand that you've been put into a series of trying positions, and that certainly in such positions no one would look their best. Nonetheless, I had hoped to see you do a bit better. Of course the police are not outside; of course we will not give you up to them. Have you not already been assured of that much? Here we find you listening at doors, and not even at the doors of influence and power, instead at such a trivial door as this? The speech of maids is like the speech of jaybirds, giving nothing, taking nothing away. A chattering, a noiseless, noiseful clatter. And you listen to it through a glass?
He sighed, and ran one of his hands across the other.
—We shall, of course, be speaking more before long. You understand very little of what goes on here, and your head is full of poor Tommy's foolish words. If only he had been kept here, that unfortunate accident would never have occurred.
The others all looked at one another in sadness.
—However, he continued, you are here, and here to stay, I assume. My daughter speaks of a trip abroad with you. Well, it can occur; I will not say it cannot occur. But as for your making yourself useful, your finding some useful employment, well, I should think a man like you would want to do that, would want to do more than simply hang around a place all day doing nothing, living off the work of others. You wouldn't want that, would you?
James admitted that he did not like to be a burden on others. In fact, he did not intend to be.
—Then I suggest you come and speak to me, tomorrow, about ten in the morning. The light in my rooms is quite fine then and encourages clear thinking and lucidity of action. We shall come up with something for you then. After all, you are quite talented, I hear. Is it true, as Grieve says, that you memorized my entire book?
There was a general gasping in the hall. McHale and Sermon looked at each other incredulously.
—It can't be, said Sermon.
—He is one of the best, said Grieve's father. We have his dossier from Beckman's.
Let them think that over, thought James proudly, very pleased with the looks on McHale's and Sermon's faces. He slipped the glass tumbler into his pocket.
—Yes, I have it, he said.
—Tomorrow, then.
The group moved off down the hall and was lost to sight. James heard a knocking.
—Are they gone?
A Gift
—Yes, said James. They're gone.
The door to no. 53 opened, and the sallow man came out again. James took a step back. The man did not smell very good.
He was holding a drawing in his hand.
—I did this for you, he said, just now.
James looked at the drawing.
There was an elephant, and its features vaguely resembled his own. The elephant was being eaten by many small furred devils, who also vaguely resembled him. They were led, however, by a man with a large baton. His face was entirely blank.
—Who is this supposed to be? asked James.
—Don't let them do that to you again, said the man. I couldn't bear it. I just couldn't.
He shut his door, leaving James with the gift of a drawing.
James went back over to the maids' door. He took out the glass, thought better of it, and simply placed his ear against the door.
—Grieve, said one voice. What happened out there, did you hear?
—No, Grieve, said another. I didn't hear a thing.
—But, Grieve, said still a third, I think it's all got to do with that James Sim.
Grieve's voice came then.
—I wish you wouldn't talk about him.
The others began to sing a sort of song they had made up to make fun of Grieve for liking James.
They are like children, thought James. He started back down the hall. There was another door on the other side of no. 53.
James approached it. The doorknob turned easily. Behind it was a small passage, and a mild light fell all along it. The passage was lined with small paintings, each no larger than a book, but well-done and obviously expensive and old. Many were landscapes, some impressionist, some more figurative. James looked at them. One he recognized
as Cézanne. It must be an original, he thought.
The passage was only five feet wide. He continued on. At the end there was a turn. The passage continued back until the point where it would be immediately below James's room. There was indeed a ladder.
Up the ladder James went.
He emerged into a tiny room, a room even tinier than the previously tiny room that he had inhabited. The room was full of pillows, and the window to the outside was thrown open. On the walls were sort of old-fashioned devices for listening and seeing into the room beyond. Into his room!
But the most surprising thing was that he was not alone in the little room. There was someone in among the pillows.
—I knew you would find me here, she said. I longed for you to find me here, and I said to myself, if he is such a man as can find me here, then I will give myself to him. Not today, you understand, but one day, perhaps, provided that you continue to show yourself to such advantage.
It was, of course, Grieve, Lily Violet, Anastasia, among the pillows.
—I love you, she said. I find it splendid to have dropped you like a witful lobster into this boiling pot. But you are learning your way out. You are. Come here! she said.
James sat down in the pillows. She pulled him on top of her.
—Why is this room here? asked James.
—I should think, said Grieve, it would be obvious.
And she bit him very hard on the neck.
—If you like, we can take off our clothes, but we cannot sleep together, and if you do anything I don't like I will scream and someone will come immediately.
—I wouldn't want that to happen, said James, thinking of the scene in the hall.
—So be good, said Grieve, and began to unbutton his shirt.
day the fifth
When James woke, it was dark. He was still lying in the tiny room. A small light came down from the moon, found purchase in the glass of the window, and met with him and with the walls.
Grieve was gone. James was naked. In fact, his clothes were gone as well.
He went over to the wall where the listening and seeing apparatuses hung. He flicked open the seeing apparatus and looked through it. He was looking at his own bed, on which Grieve lay sleeping soundly.
The devil, he thought. She got up and left me here sleeping. What kind of girl would do that?
And across the end of the bed he saw his clothes, neatly folded. That's not right, he said. That girl is not right in the head.
He thought of the walk he would have to make, along the hallway and up the stairs. It wasn't far. He could make it if he hurried, perhaps, at this hour, without seeing anyone.
He would try. He had better, he thought. Otherwise he would be stuck until she took mercy on him. Somehow he thought that it would not do to be at the mercy of Grieve Cochrane.
James raced along the passage, padding softly on his bare feet. He came to the hall door and eased it open. Out it he looked carefully. No one was there.
Good, he thought, this is going to work.
He stepped out into the hall and cautiously made for the stairs.
A cough, then, from the shadows.
One of the maids, an older woman, perhaps forty-five or fifty, stood holding a broom.
—Good evening, she said. Are you lost?
—No, said James. Good-bye.
—Good-bye, said the maid softly, as if she were patting a kept field mouse upon its furry head before closing the cardboard box of its home. Good-bye.
Back in the room, James slid into bed beside Grieve. She too was still naked. His arrival did not seem to disturb her, however.
There was a note in the pillowcase. James climbed back out of bed and went to the window. The light that had entered the small room returned to him there and then, and he looked with it upon the note.
* * *
James Leslie is the same as James Carlyle.
He and Grieve (Lily Violet) were once promised to each other.
* * *
Well, I knew that already, thought James. Though not the first bit. On the back of the note there was more writing.
* * *
Carlyle gave me a note which I delivered to Grieve's father. I couldn't read the note, since it was in cipher, but I recognized your name.
I'm sorry about before. But what was I to do? And it isn't true anyway. I just want to help you.
* * *
James thought this over. He returned to bed and curled against Grieve's warm sleep, which crept over him even as he surrendered himself to it. It was like a wooden puzzle, and all the people were distinct oblong shards of wood jutting out. Pull one, pull all, and none would move. But there was one, one special shard, that could be pulled. And after that, another, and after that, another. But who to trust?
He could hear Grieve mumbling in her sleep. She had done it last night too. But the words didn't make any sense. He listened now, and marked well in his mind what she said.
James lay on his side and looked at Grieve. He turned onto his back and looked at the ceiling. His eyes crept about the room. No. 17, he thought. The room I have been given, complete with observatory.
He wondered whether all the rooms had such observatories. No, of course not. Of course not.
He realized suddenly that he had left the elephant drawing of himself on the floor in the tiny room. This worried him immensely. A gift like that certainly should not be left on the floor.
But that room is composed solely of floor. Floor and pillows and nothing in between. There was nowhere else I could have put it, he thought.
But he knew that this logic would not hold up. The man must not see that James had left his drawing discarded on the floor. Yes, he would go first thing in the morning to fetch the drawing. What he would do with it, he could not say. He would like to bury it along with the mask. But apparently the police had the mask.
He pictured in his mind the sallow man climbing out of bed, opening the door that was almost as large as the room itself, going out into the hall, turning left, opening the door to the passage, going along the passage, up the ladder, and finding then his drawing discarded. It was terrible, terrible.
And then he would be at the aperture, listening and watching. James looked towards where the fourth window should have been. There was no way to know if the man was there now watching him.
I will walk about in the halls and see what comes of it, he thought.
An afternoon and wind in fields. He knelt in the middle of a path.
Something or someone had set off the trap. The metal teeth were closed tight. James tested its action, opening it with all his strength, cocking it, laying it again on the ground, and shoving a long stick through to the trigger.
SNAP! The stick was snapped clean through.
James set the trap once more, satisfied with its workings, between an oak and a sycamore, in a little drop of land.
—They won't see that, he said. Not though they're standing over it. Not till they're in it.
And the little boy danced off chuckling and stomping along the road and looked back twice from the crest of each increasing hill.
—To speak of observation, and observation holes, I was watching you through the argot, said Grieve. What were you doing in the kitchens last night?
—I was looking for a bit of chocolate and a bowl of milk, said James.
—Not on your life, said Grieve. You can't lie to me.
—All right, said James. I was looking for the egg room.
—The egg room! said Grieve, exclaiming. The egg room, the egg room!
—But what were you, said James, doing in the room beneath the argot?
—It's a cemetery, said Grieve. We call it Mount Auburn. My brother is there in a fold of grass. I covered him with thirty-nine stones but one went missing. Where could it be?
James drew from his pocket a book, drew from the book a pressed flower, and shook from the flower a bit of stone shaped like a crescent moon.
—Here it is, he
said. I found it in the passage by the cellar.
They were both silent. Grieve took the stone.
—You mustn't go there again, she said. You might meet me there, and then we would be through.
A dark name like a walking stick broken in anger.
—When I am out on the wind, said Grieve, I wear four arms and the trails of my dress consume me.
—Before you say any more, said James, say no more.
And so no more was said.
The fact of the matter, James decided, was that a theory was not a good theory because it was right or wrong. A theory was good for entirely other reasons. Because it presumed to be right? Presumed to be wrong? A theory could be very good that presumed to be wrong. And certainly there were theories that presumed only to be helpful in small ways. So many theories are peculiar to their centuries, and never get a second go around the merry-go-round.
My theory, James thought, is that SAMEDI decided long ago to do whatever it is he is going to do and that nothing can stop it. The trigger has already been pulled, the knife set in motion, somewhere far from here. And though we here may be affected by it, we can do nothing to alter it, nothing to stop it.
James felt very much that this was a correct theory. Of course, it was not a useful theory.
What theory would be useful? James thought for a moment.
A useful theory, ah—that Grieve's father was not Samedi, and that everyone in the house was delightful because this was the beginning of a new and unexplainable life.
It was late in the morning when James woke. Grieve was still there. She was reading from the newspaper.
—You won't believe it, she said. This wacko has sent another suicide.
There was an odd tone to her voice.
—What? asked James carefully.
—This madman, said Grieve, this Samedi. It just means Saturday in French; what kind of name is that? Anyway, he's sent men to suicide in the capital, one every day this week.
